My Fair Lady is a 1964 musical film adaptation of the Lerner and Loewe stage musical of the same name, based on the 1938 film adaptation of the original stage play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. The film was directed by George Cukor and starred Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director. In Edwardian London, Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), an arrogant, irascible, misogynistic teacher of elocution, believes that the accent and tone of one's voice determines a person's prospects in society. He boasts to a new acquaintance, Colonel Hugh Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), himself an expert in phonetics, that he could teach any woman to speak so "properly" that he could pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball, citing, as an example, a young flower seller from the slums, Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), who has a strong Cockney accent. Eliza goes to Higgins seeking speech lessons. Her great ambition is to work in a flower shop, but her thick accent makes her unsuitable for such a position. All she can afford to pay is a shilling per lesson, whereas Higgins is used to training wealthier members of society.